If you have not heard yet, Poker.org sold for $1 Million Dollars. Yes, the domain name was Poker.org, not poker.com or poker.net or xyzpoker.com… it was Poker.org . Although the coverage in the domain industry would be considered light by most standards for a 7 figure sale, why I do not know but the coverage so far does seem pretty light on the sale.
Anyway…
So I like to read stories from Other Industries based on the news (sale of a domain) that the domain is related to. In this case, I happened to read a story from within the Poker Industry. The reason I like to see and read the stories from in the industry, is to how they react to the domain name purchase. This can shine a lot of light on how they feel about domain names.
So I was reading a story from PokerNewsDaily.com and something jumped out at me right away in the story! Something that I see often really when it comes to domain names OTHER THAN .com . See highlighted yellow below:
Even though the writer Brett was talking about the sale of Poker.org, he stated Poker.com in his story while talking about the domain! Why do people do this? Because the .com TLD has become very natural for people to type in and say, because the vast majority of sites they visit daily ARE .com domains.
I am sure the writer simply made a mistake but it also proves a point that owning the .com domain is very important for many reasons. .com is often the beneficiary of the traffic.
Keywords are very important in domain names and one of the main reasons Poker.org sold for $1 Million. This type of domain name will be mainly used for Search Engine reasons to try and rank high for Poker and Poker related search terms which decreases the chances of people typing .com instead of .org but doesn’t eliminate it. As for branding a company or using a domain name other than .com so people can find you on the net, going away from .com will likely often result in the example above. Not only will people often say .com instead of .net or .org, people often type .com instead of .org!
An extra focus needs to be done when marketing anything other than a .com when people are expected to use direct navigation. There is little control over the people that "talk" about your site but use the wrong TLD. The only way to prevent this, is to own the .com TLD.
domain report
Sometimes when I visit my own websites that are country code tld’s, I’ll type in the .com instead. If I do it for my own domains, I can imagine how often the public would do it.